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Salient. An Organ of Student Opinion at Victoria College, Wellington, N.Z. Vol. 12, No. 9. August 10th 1949

The Fault, Dear Brutus . .

page 2

The Fault, Dear Brutus . . .

Being an extract from a speech which will Not be delivered on September 3, 1949.

"And so, ladies and gentlemen, I ask you to look back to that day. It was only ten years ago. We have seen how it all happened; we can see quite clearly that we were as much at fault as anyone else—that there never has been a war in which, like the Old Time Theatre, it was the good, good hero versus the bad, bad villain.

"So for this, for our sins as much as their's, we were landed into another war. Between that September night and this, what has happened?

"I am going to be accused of playing on your emotions. But please consider—coolly and dispassionately if you can—the result. How many corpses were neatly stacked into rows'or piles? I don't know. Thirty million? Forty? How many people are still, even now, wandering round what rubble has been left to mark their homes? Another fifty millions? It's a nice thought that we can cloak this sort of unpleasantness with the satisfying abstraction of statistics—we might be shocked, ladies and gentlemen, out of our post-war stupor if it weren't for statistics: in how many countries is there still famine—we'll call it an unsatisfied consumer demand for staple foods, and make it less shocking? In how many countries are the schools non-existent, the children growing up learning their arithmetic from black-market cigarette deals? And that reminds me, ladies and gentlemen, that we, too, suffered in this country: I still find it hard to get a decent pipe tobacco.

"Here we are, ladies and gentlemen, ten years later and a few tens of millions the less. Some of us are thinner—and that reminds me that I musn't keep you from this excellent supper too long. Here we are.

"Where?

"You can answer that one as well as I. Read over the back numbers of the papers. Listen to the politicians' speeches. What has our commonsense benefited from the millions who are—let us not be emotional—'no longer with us'?

"May I suggest, ladies and gentlemen, that we are not a whit better off?

"We can talk of Democracy, of Preserving Our Glorious Heritage, and Defending Our Way of Life. And what have we learnt for the improvement of this Way of Life, from the—shall I term it 'demise'—of those millions? May I suggest again, not a thing?

"Here we are again, ready to be lead into battle by the first capable clarion blower who comes on the scene. Ready again to deplete the numbers of the human race by another few tens of millions. Ready again to—ah—liquidate that man who doesn't agree with us, in the name of tolerance and freedom of opinion. Ready again, ladies and gentlemen, to jeopardise the chances of existence for the whole of our species, if only our national pride is saved in the holocaust. And when we have done it again, where will we be?

"Do you mind if I think—nowhere?

"Some time ago, before the last war, I think, Louis MacNeice summed the world situation up like this:

'The gloss is falling hour by hour,
'the glass will fall forever:
'but if you break the bloody glass,
'you won't hold up the weather.'

"Perhaps we are not so badly off as all that. Perhaps we are not, as Shaw also doubted, 'incurably depraved'. But may I suggest that war again and again and again is merely an attempt to break the glass in order to hold up the weather; that perhaps, if the cause can be tackled at all, it certainly isn't that way?

"Ladies and gentlemen, I give you—the Human Race!"

D. G.